...and still, people don't realise the very reason why Blizzard is not making a second Ulduar is, because it was an overkill of content and effectively wasted their resources, since quality of replayability goes down the gutter the moment a newer patch is introduced(unless its a hard-mode). The raid having a terrible culmination in terms of story progression is another reason, I didn't like it, or having stuck at Vezax for long may be another reason for it as well. In addition, its wise on Blizzard's side to not introduce anything closely related with previous content, as the slightest of similarity eeks the player out, which is the very reason why some players perceive DS being bad, which in my opinion are players with shallow thinking in addition to being non-observant, too bad we don't have an attunement system to eliminate or enforce an understanding on players who are trying to enter it.

i've got a solution to the long raid problem, make raids longer but release them in chunks, sort of like they have done with dragon soul in the lfr, develop the siege of wyrmrest temple, release it for testing, while that's being tested, start development on the fall of deathwing, means content is released regularly but overall after a slightly longer period of time, people can do the long version if they wish (all of it in a row) so essentially the first half will be released on all difficulties, then the second half at a later date, while lfr will remain in two halves, the normal and heroic difficulties will be made into one whole raid. Kind of like the gating they did in icecrown

Maybe cut out all the ridiculous annoying trash to try and pad the raids and give us bosses. Ulduar was long because that first crappy part with the Siege Engines and you had to fight a bunch of trash and some joker would always pull the trash while shooting down those things. Then the boss would come out and a few people in your raid weren't inside the arena so it was a wipe. The boss takes a few minutes to kill but that whole ordeal took 10-15m. Then you moved on and had to fight those Molten Colossus and then that fire whirlwind trash down the stairs, then the constructs if you went to Ignis. Razorscale had no trash...well except for the fight itself. XT has those 2 trash packs. The whole hallway to Iron Council had a bunch of annoying trash. Once past Kolo you had those 2 big Guardians you had to fight. Then you had to wait for Cat lady to slowly pat around. You do a ready check and some joker isnt ready till after she pats back and its not something you can just say to hell with it im going cause if you didnt get the pull right some tank was going to die. So you just wasted a couple minutes there. The roads to Mimiron, Hodir are trash pack central. Thorim wasnt bad for trash till the fight started and you were in the arena. Freya had a whole room FULL of trash and 3 mini bosses. The trash prior to Vezzax was excessive. This is all under ideal conditions where you kill the bosses before the trash respawns. I remember having an addon that tracked the trash respawn in Freya's room. Having to clear that room multiple times a night while working on a boss was really annoying.

Dont get me wrong. I loved Ulduar's bosses but the trash in that place took the lions share of the time to clear, it was fun to figure out the first couple of weeks but after that it was just a time wasting chore. Maybe if you cut the trash down and let people focus on downing bosses more people would have cleared the place.

So in summation. Nobody is going to complain if there is a 13 boss raid if they dont have to spend half the week clearing trash. It will probably get cleared at a higher percentage than a trash filled Ulduar.

"Ulduar is an example of a raid where lots of players got to enjoy the first few bosses, and very few players ever saw the last few. Yogg Saron and Algalon were among the least-killed bosses ever"Ulduar was the best raid blizzard has ever made. And when the nerfs came to the end of the expansion, 99% of my server got in Ulduar and got to see yogg. Algalon on the other hand needed A KEEEEEEY, which obviously makes less people get to see the encounter.

I thought when they would introduce a new class that it would be some sort of battle mage to wear the int plate in all 3 specs but the monk will be forcing its way into more demand for leather / cloth not a great design decision in the end.

What is people's problem with Intellect Plate gear? I don't want to wear Mail or Cloth or have to re-do my reforging and re-learn about how Strength now converts to Spirit. So it dropped for you and you didn't have a Holy Paladin in the raid... and? I see lots of items getting disenchanted in raids, because nobody needs or wants or can make any use of it. Besides, I see my BiS rings, necks, weapons and cloaks (Haste/Spirit) being won by Shadow Priests and Elemental Shamans all the time. Let us have something that is ours only, please.

This makes intelect plate horrible as lootdrops, because only 1 spec of 1 class can use it.
The mail solution seems best imo. This will make all gear drops usable for at least 3 different specs. Damage (or tank for that matter) plate sharing seems like a good 2nd option, but that would need a lot more work.

what do you think about the intellect plate issue? I do think it is a problem, that only one specc of one class needs that stuff. to make it fair, you have to tune the drop chance of plate int drops down to a very low level, which makes it hard ford holy pallys to get their gear, and on the other hand, if it drops more than once, it will get dissed 100%ly... its a bit of a stupid situation. (there are similar situation for cloth spirit, mail spirit, but at least there are also 2 different roles that need them, makeing it much more likely to be of use more than once)

looking in to the future, I would have thought they could get rid of the issue, by introducing a new class, that also needs int plate. but with monks being the next class, that option has gone.but on the other hand, wouldn't it be an acceptable compromise, to introduce a specc bonus (those that you automatically get when speccing Healer-monk) that would allow them to wear int plate (awell as changing the gear bonus to plate for the 5% int) ?that would eliminate a lot of problems. The only issue would be the gear style. but with transmogrification, I see that problem as minor, because you can change your looks to what you prefer anyway. (and not all int leather will look monk-y I assume, because druids want to wear them aswell)wouldn't that be the best solution to the problem? seems very obvious to me, but was not listed as one of the opportunities in the bluepost...

Here's the thing -- Ulduar is an example of a raid where lots of players got to enjoy the first few bosses, and very few players ever saw the last few. Yogg Saron and Algalon were among the least-killed bosses ever, and not because they were exceedingly difficult. Rather, clearing the dungeon all the way to Yogg took up a big chunk of a raiding week (and you only had an hour to kill Algalon), and the ability to extend raid lockouts came later in 3.2.0 (but extending raid lockouts means getting less loot overall). Raid Finder partially resolves the length-of-raid problem, so we can consider designing longer raids, but that's not always an easy call. Long raids mean longer development time, and while some players might be willing to wait, we understand why others might get impatient.

No. What happened was they released Trial of The Crusader which was a 1-room, 5 boss loot pinata that made Ulduar completely obsolete. With Ulduar the design team got it perfectly right. The length of the instance was not a problem, either. My guild raided 6 hours a week and we could easily clear to yogg in 1 night-- and I'd hardly call us an uber guild. We just don't like wasting time. Also. The Yogg / Lich King encounters were both VASTLY superior to the end-boss encounters in Cataclysm. Nefarian was "ok" but Madness of Deathwing is just kind of boring, I'm sad to say. I hope in MoP dungeon end-bosses will be much more elaborate, challenging, and fun.

to be fair Algalon and Yogg we're probably among the least killed bosses because ToC was released too early and ToC had 4 levels of difficulty each week. completing ToC on 10 man norm/heroic and 25 man norm/heroic didnt leave much time or incentive to continue Ulduar progression.

Pally healing plate is definitely the only items in the game that exist for only 1 spec and 1 class and have for some time. It honestly seems silly to try and get rid of it and convert a str piece to work as a healing item considering other stats on plate like expertise as stated. My idea would be twofold. First, to rework a DK spec to use plate intellect and be a ranged dps class. Think of the way their class is atm, its pretty much the same 3 specs as a warrior, 1 tank and 2 dps specs with all 3 trying to be viable in some way for both pvp and pve. Ever since DKs came out I've felt a lot of raids suffer from the addition of another melee class, of course this won't be the case everytime but it did throw in another melee class in an environment that has typically favored range. Second, another way of making plate int better would be to give holy paladins the ability to actually be a range dps class instead of heals, similar to how a druids bear and cat tree is. I know from my GFs experience that playing as only a holy paladin and not liking ret or prot totally frustrates her for leveling or any grinding.